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Wireless is the only fun part of IT, these days

Dogbert got it nearly right. Some few years ago, Dilbert was boasting about how the world would divide into those who understood computers and those who didn't. "And those who don't will depend on those of us who do, and they'll have a special word for us," Dilbert warns.

"Secretaries," agrees Dogbert.

Actually, the way things are going, the word is going to be more like "auditors" - and the post of "digital auditor" can only be days away.

Conversation between highly qualified techies has always gone over the head of most fashion victims and cocktail posers. But in the last five years, the flavour of it has changed.

In the early days of the microcomputer, conversations were about the basics. Today, people may still not really know what RAM or ROM actually are, but even estate agents think they know when to use the word; they may not be any more sure why disks are called "rotating media" than they were two decades ago, but they know what disks are for, and they know what a TFT is - or at least, they know an LCD isn't a CRT.

Today, the conversation is indistinguishable from the chatter of auditors wrangling over some accounting rule.

Ninety per cent of the crushing put-downs in techie chat will be of the form you used to hear only from chartered accountants disputing a new regulation laid down by Parliament in a recent statutory instrument. "Oh, that was fixed back in August 98 in a service pack, and the patch was incorporated in the release in May 2001 when they updated ... " and boy! if you didn't know that, you ARE a fool!

People who, five years ago, were as Gods to me, and who not only knew How Things Work, but Where We Are Going now refuse to discuss technology because they're utterly bored by lists of Internet port numbers - most of which they have down by memory, together with the programs which use them.

A decade ago, these people were disputing the direction of strategic thinking inside Intel. Today, armed with no less arrogant certainty, they will tell you, straight, that this or that technical trick won't work, this or that idea is pointless, and nobody under the age of 35 knows anything about technology anyway.

That is, until you get into the area of mobile data.

Suddenly, when you're talking about wireless payments, nobody actually knows anything. They have strongly held opinions, not dogmatic facts stored in old dusty files in a corner of their skulls. If you discuss strategic plans for third generation phones, the experts will acknowledge that even they aren't sure where it's all going to end up, and that the road which leads to the promised land can't be signposted accurately. Ideas hold sway, not statistics; possibilities and potential are the stuff of debate, instead of defensive "best practice" traditions designed to minimise support time.

When the PC world was young, a software developer could write an application which had a simple function. Probably, nobody else had written any such thing before. These days, a developer is lucky to be given the job of integrating a new link between the data mining storage subsystem and the web publishing servers; and to do it, will need tediously detailed inside knowledge of more system function calls and network interface classes than anybody could bear to learn from scratch.

Of course, in another decade, or less, the world of wireless will be handed over to administrators, instead of developers. What you do will be totally constrained, not just in terms of what you can get a licence to do, but also in terms of how many dozen inter-related systems integration standards you have to satisfy before you will be allowed to let loose on the Net.

It's called systems integration, of course, because it makes the systems appear, to the user, like a simple device which you "just turn on, and it works." It's wonderful that it can be done.

You just don't want to be the man who does it, that's all.